The Age of Hyperreproduction: Latent Floods, Autosimulacra, and the Media Ecology of Generative AI
This paper formalises the concept of hyperreproduction as a theoretical framework for understanding the present condition of AI-mediated cultural production. The term names a media-ecological condition in which generative AI systems, embedded within platform infrastructures and driven by imperatives of content maximisation, data extraction, and perpetual scalar growth, produce content at scales and velocities that transform the ecology of cultural production itself. Established structures of authorship are eroded and the contextual grounds upon which cultural objects acquire meaning are destabilised, while the accumulated musical archive is subsumed into the latent spaces of generative models as raw material from which further content can be perpetually spawned. Tracing a genealogy from mechanical reproduction (Benjamin) through simulacral circulation (Baudrillard), the paper argues that hyperreproduction constitutes a historically distinct media ecology in which content is continuously spawned (prompted by prosumers and increasingly by autonomous agentic systems), structurally open to endless reconfiguration, and progressively decoupled from the social, historical, and biographical conditions of its production. The spawned object's primary referent increasingly becomes the system of its own production. The paper identifies and theorises a constellation of interlocking conditions that constitute hyperreproduction: latent floods, semiotic deflation, the liquefaction of the cultural object, infrastructural capture, recursive loops, latent enclosures, the autosimulacral turn, contextual voids, Dead Internet dynamics, and the post-authentic condition, arguing that hyperreproduction operates simultaneously across individual, platform, cultural, and ecosystemic levels as both a condition and a structurally accelerating tendency of contemporary media ecologies.